The number of films being made in 3D is falling – and so are ticket sales, it emerged this week. Broadcasters Francine Stock, presenter of Radio 4's The Film Programme, and Danny Leigh, critic and co-host of BBC1's Film 2012, discuss whether the 3D bubble has burst. Emine Saner listens in.
Danny Leigh: The death knell has been sounding for a while. It's impossible to talk about 3D without a slightly funereal bearing, because it has not worked. When Avatar came out, it seemed like the dawning of a new era, but if I was financially invested in 3D, I would be feeling a bit glum because there hasn't been a follow-up to Avatar, either a film or a general groundswell of enthusiasm.
Francine Stock: The problem is that too many companies have tried to get out a 3D film and they've done this rather weird retro-fitting, so they shot it in 2D and made it look 3D afterwards. It looks as though they've bunged together a couple of pieces of MDF. Whatever you think about James Cameron, he wanted to do it properly and he did. Wim Wenders' Pina, a dance documentary, got close to the experience of performance, and that was a really intelligent use of it. In Martin Scorsese's Hugo, with the sequences in Méliès' studio, he was doing something so intelligent – showing in 3D how those early two-dimensional films were made.
DL: Scorsese was pushing boundaries with Hugo, but also what he did was the dread thing you supposedly can't do with any 3D film now, the "pointy stick". There's the moment where the doberman's muzzle looms out of the screen, and it's a very witty, lovable touch. Scorsese is a film historian, and you can't escape 3D's origins – this trashy, gimmicky trick where things loom out of the screen at you. But commercially, 3D films, even the kids' films, have been so chronically afraid of having the "pointy stick". It's so determined to become subtly immersive. If you've taken your kids and paid vast amounts for the 3D experience, you're thinking, what am I paying for again?
FS: But you can see why they did it, just as in the early 1950s, when TV is taking hold, they start doing [1953 3D film] House of Wax and all that stuff. You can see the same thing happening – you have to have the theatrical experience because we've got sophisticated home entertainment. Then along come the manufacturers with their 3D TVs.
DL: But actually nobody wants this in their homes, because they can't seem to surmount the obstacle of wearing the glasses. Again, commercially it's falling apart. 3D is really only part of a much wider narrative about the problem Hollywood is facing – you have a generation now who are engaged with games far more than films, and there is a level of immersion they experience that film simply doesn't offer them. Year by year, bigger chunks of their potential audience are dropping away, and 3D is an attempt by Hollywood and the wider industry to claw that audience back. A genuine 4D experience isn't your chair rocking about and tingling your leg – at some point there has to be that moment when you're Buster Keaton stepping into the screen and becoming part of the film.
FS: If you go back to the beginning, at the turn of the 20th century William Friese-Greene was doing stereoscopic projection, and it keeps coming back every so often. We obviously like it, but it's as if we haven't quite realised what the best use of it is.
DL: Whatever the technical and artistic virtues of 3D, the approach by Hollywood has been nakedly money-grubbing, ratcheting up ticket prices. On the other hand, the more vocal critics of 3D have their own agenda, something to rail against, and play to the gallery.
FS: If only that investment had gone into better scripts – that's where you want the invention and interest to go. It's partly our fault. We are too passive in accepting dodgy stories and the same formulaic films, so the studios feel they have to put their originality into the technical side. I'm not against the immersive 3D. Even in a film such as Beowulf, which is appalling. But there is one moment where they go into Grendel's mother's cave and you suddenly feel the depth. Equally in Avatar, I liked a shot in the spaceship where there's nothing much happening, but you get that depth.
DL: We have seen experimental filmmakers, particularly those towards the end of their careers – Herzog, Wenders and Scorsese, to some extent – playing with 3D. It's play, it didn't feel like Herzog is committing to 3D. And we've had these turgid blockbusters and nothing in the middle. The kind of films that go up for Oscars – The King's Speech – that draw in the people who see two or three films a year, those have not been 3D movies. That's where 3D has missed a trick. If 3D was really going to transfer to the mainstream, then Bond would be made in it. With The Woman in Black – a prime candidate because it is all about things jumping out at you – they obviously made an explicit decision not to use 3D. There's almost a stigma to it.
FS: It can be used in an expressionistic way. It is used rather beautifully in Dial M for Murder in 1954 – it's claustrophobic, it's to do with the angles, and all these things can be accentuated as a tool.
DL: But, from a 3D point of view, there is this terrible omen there – Hitchcock, this relatively prestigious film-maker at that point, getting involved with 3D in the same way Scorsese has, and then abandoning it. I don't think Scorsese will make another 3D movie.
FS: I talked to Scorsese just before Hugo came out and asked him, if I'm watching Raging Bull, how can I be more in the ring with Jake La Motta than I already am? He said: "If I'd had 3D, I would have done it." Maybe it would have been even better.
DL: One of the films I'm most looking forward to is Tales of the Night, from Michel Ocelot, who makes incredible children's films, which is in 3D. Nobody can convince me this is some sort of awful, artistically bankrupt, commercial film. He's genuinely intrigued by the possibilities. Hollywood milked it so quickly and aggressively, you lost the audience. Avatar was a deeply dull film on lots of levels, but it did offer the first primitive step forward to something genuinely interesting, and if that route is closed off because people are so appalled by the Last Airbender, that would be a shame. For a true cinema lover, you have to be open to embracing revolution, no matter how tawdry it seems.
